Week 11: The New Barbarians (1983)
“It would be wonderful, a dream would be that no country would have nukes, but if countries are going to have nukes, we’re going to be at the top of the pack.”
Part of his Bronx Warriors Trilogy, director Enzo G. Castellari (1990: The Bronx Warriors and Escape from the Bronx) brings back George Eastman (1990: The Bronx Warriors), Giancarlo Prete (Escape from the Bronx), and Fred “Hammer” Williamson (1990: The Bronx Warriors) in The New BarbariansI, a movie that has nothing to do with the Bronx. Credit where it’s due, Fred Williamson looks great, but not as great as Anna Kanakis, because, well done, costume designer Mario Giorsi: what you lack in post-nuclear holocaust realism chic, you make up for in OMFG!
The New Barbarians opens with a nuclear strike melting a city, forwarding in time to a barren landscape strewn with corpses in sexy, boob-windowed hazmat suits and the text “2019 A.D. The nuclear holocaust is over.” A small band of survivors is just trying to make their way through this crazy, mixed-up world, rationing what little food they have and continuously trying to signal anyone left alive before the antagonist Templars show up, pew-pewing their hopes against the rocks. Riding what-sounds-like-electric,-but-exhausts-like-gas future dune buggies, the Templars somehow are able to wear pristine white uniforms with see-through chest plates and perfectly coiffed hair in the apocalypse, like a Broadway musical version of the bad guys in The Road Warrior. Loner Scorpion (Prete) shares an uneasy past with the Templars which comes to a head when he intervenes in their abduction of Alma (Kanakis). After a colorful sex scene and some inter-Templar noncompliance, Alma and Scorpion find a caravan of faithful survivors who believe in a thing called “God.” Alma opts to stay in the hopes of building a society and Scorpion opts to leave, because he’s a loner, Alma, a rebel. When he learns the Templars have discovered the God caravan, loner Scorpion teams up with fellow loner Nadir (Williamson) and a murderously scrappy boy genius to take down the Templars once and for all.
The dystopia of The New Barbarians is set in 2019, nine years after a nuclear holocaust, so thanks, Obama. The landscape is a deserted wasteland mostly devoid of food and hope (mostly). The immaculate, dune-buggied Templars are a nihilist man cult lead by One (Eastman) whose driving motivation is to purge all life whenever they encounter it, as a form of vengeance against the world leaders who initiated the nuclear war, a roving riot perpetuating a violent series of psychotically sarcastic “Is this what you want?!”s screamed to the long dead. There are no women among the Templars, because there is no need to continue the race. New members of the Templars are initiated from a ritual spectacle of public rape conducted by One, facilitated by Shadow, One’s number two. MGTOWing, it’s a prison culture without walls and one wheels.
All thinking about Trump and nuclear apocalypse needs to be within the context that he doesn’t understand the severity of nuclear weaponry. Sympathetically recognizing that President Trump can’t read, it’s still no excuse in an America where everyone has seen The Terminator (1984). As originally reported by Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s The Morning Joe:
"Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump. And three times [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can't we use them."
President Trump neither understands the don’t-play-chicken lessons of the Cold War, nor the enormous disaster that nuclear weapons pose to life and the environment for, in the case of Uranium-235, the kind that was in the bomb dropped over Hiroshima onto civilian targets on August 6, 1945, a half-life of 700 million years. Nuclear capability has gotten only more devastating since World War II, as Chernobyl released 200 times more radiation than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, combined. To that end, Chernobyl won’t be safe for human habitation for at least another 20,000 years. A lasting impact of nuclear exposure, of course, is cancer, as the risk of cancer doubles when the exposure to radiation doubles, and the risk of leukemia quadruples when the exposure to radiation doubles. One result of the U.S.’s test and use of nuclear weapons is a cancer pandemic in its own citizens.
President Trump intends to increase the budget for nuclear weapons by more than $1 billion in 2018. It is two and a half minutes to midnight on the Doomsday Clock.
